The present disclosure herein relates to a digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), and more specifically, to an assist device for elastography and a digital breast tomosynthesis system and a method using the same for breast lesion diagnosis.
Recently, due to the advent of an aging era and improvement of people's living standard, early diagnosis and treatment of disease for healthy life has been gaining interest, and cancer among various diseases is the first major cause of death, and thereby has been the most important cause threatening national health. When classifying cancer incidence into categories, in case of men, stomach cancers, lung cancers, liver cancers, and colorectal cancers, which are the four major cancers and account for about 66% of the total male cancer incidence, have high occurrence ratios, in this order. On the contrary, in case of women, breast cancers, thyroid caners, stomach cancers, colorectal cancers, and lung cancers have high occurrence ratios in this order, and thus the breast cancers turn out to be occurring more frequently than the four major cancers. As such, in case of women, to diagnose in an early stage and treat the breast cancer having the highest occurrence ratio may be an important factor that should take precedence for a healthy life of a woman.
Among the diagnosis methods for breast cancers, mammography is a method mainly used for the breast cancer diagnosis for subclinical women. However, the mammography mainly used in typical cases is a technique using a two-dimensional image, and has many difficulties in detecting micro-calcification which is an important element for early diagnosis of breast cancer because a lesion of a target region is imaged to overlap normal tissues. Accordingly, the mammography has a low distinguishing capability and thereby has a high probability of generating a false positive or a false negative. Therefore, there are problems of accompanying additional inspection such as re-imaging or unnecessary biopsy to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. To overcome these technical limitation in the breast cancer diagnosis technique using two-dimensional images, a digital breast tomosynthesis system (hereinafter, referred to as DBT) which is a breast cancer diagnosis technique using three-dimensional images is proposed.
Also, in elastography, which is recently developed and exhibits a preferential performance in the diagnosis of tumors, ultrasonic images are captured while a specific surface of a human body is vibrated at several ten Hz from the outside. The elastography reconstructs an elastic feature image from the difference between the ultrasonic images captured at this time to thereby visualize an elastic feature image of a human body, and thus has received attention as a functional ultrasonic image.